The Way Remastered (Nintendo Switch) Review

When a game mentions a beloved classic as big source of inspiration as one of the selling bullet-points, it really should, at the very least, match it on some level. The Way Remastered is not coy about how much it owes to Eric Chahi. It gets to points where it becomes derivative and distracting. What is most disappointing about The Way, is that it does not share the same level of craftsmanship of the games it is influenced by. When Chahi made Another Wold, almost entirely by himself, he agonised over the minutia of the game's animations and visuals. The Way's developer lacks the same spirit of craftsmanship and artistry. The player-character lacks fluid and life-like animation and is poorly designed; looking more like a red re-colour of Pitfall Harry from the Atari 2600. The visuals are the clichéd faux-retro look that many indie teams strive for, but they fail to truly capture that meticulous craftsmanship that designers managed with such limited resources.

In other cinematic platformers, characters tend to move with a profound sense of weight and all actions were carefully scripted to connect with one another to give the impression of a very realistic and life-like character. The Way does not really abide by these parameters and for some who are not interested in cinematic platformers, this may be a good thing. This handles more or less like any other run-of-the-mill platfomer. There is no real weight behind the character's movements and the low amount of frames of animation make the character feel pretty responsive as a result, even if it looks terrible. However, since The Way is selling itself on the terms that it is like cinematic platformers such as Another World, it should be held to a similar standard. There is basically nothing that The Way does that Another World didn't do better and that can be especially applied to how it tells its story.

Before it was remastered, The Way did not have any voice acting. It relied on text, which was already a sloppy way to tell a story in a sub-genre that typically relies on visuals to convey ideas. The thing is, The Way really did not really need any text or voice acting to express what was happening in the story. The designers needed to be a bit more confident in their players' ability to interpret imagery or to let them wonder. Some attempts at innovation only reinforce how some of the limitations of much older games of this style only made them better. The fact that much of any given area is no longer restricted to one screen at a time ultimately becomes a bit of a nuisance since checkpoints can now feel like they are being put in randomised and illogical positions. Early on, checkpoints seem to have some thought put into them, since dying respawns the hero in a general vicinity of death. As the game progresses, the checkpoints become extremely distant and are put only at the start of a large map or after fulfilling some goal. Since the hero dies in a single hit, this is going to guarantee a lot of unfair deaths and it is not helped by the spotty hit detection.

Death, then trial and error, is a big part of the gameplay for games like this, for better and for worse. Having the checkpoints managed in a way that makes the game fair is very important to making these enjoyable and The Way just does not. The one contribution that makes this interesting is the semi-open-ended way users can assess the multi-part goals. This leads to lots of discovery and moments of realisation that is important to adventuring. Having such vast and open levels tends to result in lots of slow and tedious backtracking to areas that are empty and pungent with the aroma of filler... not the good kind of filler used to make twinkies, either. This is a pretty short game and, looking back, there is a fair amount of eye-glazing, sleep-inducing padding.

What is left of The Way when it is looked at on its own merits? It is a very generic adventure game with some really bad and amateurish pixel art and animation. This ends up looking worse than most SNES and NES titles because the artists just did not understand colour and design. The music might be the only quality that is consistent throughout. This will be another forgettable and stereotypical indie game, though, that leans on its influences to get by, as opposed to having anything substantial of its own.